We Eat Our Own (26 page)

Finally, you manage: There are some terrible people, sure.

Do you know what this film is really about?

Ugo stops, turns to face you. His face is furious, in total disagreement with his voice. You stand there, staring, trying to put the two together.

No.

Do you know why I—why
I
wrote it?

No.

He buries two fingers in the cap of muscle above his heart.

This is my film, Ugo says. You play the lead journalist who filmed the footage
within
my
film. But you know what?

His glare is unblinking and lands cross-eyed between your eyes like a dart.

That film, that is mine, too.

There is a wildness in Ugo's face. The muscles under his eyes struggle to contain it. The machete is still in his fist.

He sniffs once, gestures toward a bare spot on the rain forest floor. Now, you two, lie down there.

What?

Lie down there and kiss her.

• • •

This is why you do not see the man who comes through the trees:

Because Ugo tells you to kiss each other with your eyes open, and to stare right into each other's eyes as your mouths move.

Because Ugo keeps the machete close, squats down and plants the blade in the ground and braces himself against it. Because Ugo is two feet away from you and giving so many commands.

Arch. Better. Put her on top.

Because you are an American from a state with wide fields and quiet water, and you don't know how to listen for footsteps in the trees.

Because the man who is watching is a trained guerilla operative, fleet on his knees, and has been tracking you for days.

Because Irena tastes like rum and vomit and it's all you can do to kiss her back.

Because you are supposed to be Richard, who does not mind the way she tastes.

Because this is not your body you are in right now. Because Irena is not in her body, either. Gayle is the one who grinds her hips into yours. Richard is the one who feels the pressure
of it, the heat. Their bodies were never yours to do with as you like, not her, not you, not while Ugo is watching.

Because Ugo is watching.

Because Ugo is watching, and he is unzipping his camera bag and about to start filming. But even he cannot see the man coming up behind him, or the Kalashnikov in one of the man's fists, the knife low in the other. Because you are an American and you have not trained yourself to see things moving in the mud, a face streaked in mud, hands coated in mud so that every part of him blends into the trees.

Irena is on top of you, and then suddenly the Kalashnikov is digging into the center of her spine.

You see the fear in her eyes before you see the shape of the man behind her. You don't even notice the knife until it is shining like a necklace at her throat.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Signor Velluto, we have questioned you for fourteen days.

VELLUTO:
I'm aware, Signor Procuratore. I'm tired, too.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Then why continue? What's the sense?

VELLUTO:
I agree. But you won't let me go that easy.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
I mean that
you
could end this. If you would simply produce your actors for the court, you could prove incontrovertibly that they are alive.

VELLUTO:
My attorney has submitted the film into evidence. Draw your own conclusions. You will anyway.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
The film shows them being murdered, sir. Eaten. You would confess to the court that these are all special effects?

VELLUTO:
I would not. No. That would ruin the film, I would not.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Then you would confess to our giudice that you were a documentarian?

VELLUTO:
I would ask them to watch the film and draw their own conclusions.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Are you conceding that human lives were lost during the making of your movie, Signor Velluto?

VELLUTO:
I would. Of course I would. Aren't they always, in some sense?

PROCURATORE CAPO:
We're in a courtroom, Signor Velluto, we don't have time for you to speak in this sort of artistic—

VELLUTO:
I've said what you wanted. I've said what you wanted me to say.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
You seem tired, signore. Perhaps—

[Wherein Velluto turns to the avvocato and whispers.]

AVVOCATO:
Signor Giudice, may we request a recess? My client would like to discuss a deal.

THE ACTOR

Ovidio

I
n a way, this isn't happening to you.

You're still lying under Irena, and the rebel is behind her, his knife flashing in your eyes. You know this, but your body doesn't; you cannot make it move.

You could say that it's happening to Richard, but that's not true, either. He doesn't react when the rebel repositions his gun and presses it to the white nape of her neck. He doesn't bargain or yelp or swing. He cannot move, either.

This is the kind of terror that blanks a mind and leaves a body empty. This is not happening to you: you are somewhere else watching from the black-green shiver of the trees, not on the ground with your heart in your mouth, certainly not in control.

So let's not tell it that way.

The American actor is the one this is happening to. He is the one whose hands fall off the actress' waist as the rebel forces her onto her knees. The knife at her throat is the brightest thing, flecked in black dirt. It reflects the V of bone under her chin, the tiny press of her tongue inside her jaw as she tries to swallow.

The director throws his machete in the dirt behind him
and raises his palms. The rebel barks a word in Spanish—­Levántate—and the actress staggers to her feet.

The American can't stop looking at the reflection of her jaw in the knife blade. I was just kissing her, he thinks. I was just
kissing
her.

And then the rebel jerks the rifle out from behind the actress and points it straight at the American, and then suddenly everything is real and so terribly green and he is scuttling back and up and there is mud smeared up the length of him.

Ponte de rodillas!

The American stands; the rebel screams again.

He dicho ponte de rodillas!

He falls to his knees.

• • •

Here is something the American actor doesn't know:

The rebel is named Juan Carlos. The rebel has been in the jungle for less than two weeks and he is still not used to the maddening way his sweat never dries, or the way the lines in his palms are always veined black with filth, or anything else about this place, though the American actor would never guess. Two weeks ago, this rebel was pretending to be a businessman in a safe house in Bogotá. Six months before that, he was a university student who listened to Gang of Four and read Rosa Luxembourg in his dorm room, who came home to his mother's house for dinner every Sunday and told her lies.

Here is something the director doesn't realize yet:

That this is the same man who was at the American proprietor's house, sobbing in the hallway about a girl who had been killed. That when he left, he slammed the American's front
door, surged down the porch stairs and then paused. Pivoted; listened to his own breath, which was ragged and desperate, like he'd been running. Juan Carlos waited for an instinct to tell him what to do, and then his arm decided. He overhanded his lantern into the American's front door, and watched the glass explode.

The director tries to speak but the rebel is shouting again. The director can pick out some of the rebel's words from his Spanish—
kidnap
and
don't move—
but he can't parse the rest.

The rebel stayed outside the American's house for too long, waiting to see if the fire from his lantern would catch. He was drunk and furious and he wanted to see the house burn, to see smoke rise to the doorknob, the brass clouding with smoke shapes as the fire climbed. He knew exactly how much work it must have taken to get that doorknob there, how much the American must have paid to ship it down from Tarapacá, and he knew exactly where that money came from. It came from their backs, their blood, their women, their hands hauling coca paste into the hulls of planes instead of fighting their war. He'd been shipped down here, too, on cars and shuddering motorboats and on a hike that made his girlfriend cry from the sores on her ankles and feet and the bites that studded her whole body, that made him shout at her to focus, to remember what all this was for, to remember what Andres died for, to pick her gun back up and walk. He'd been shipped down here with his girlfriend with an ideal, and now she and Andres and the ideal were all dead.

The rebel thinks of this as he pulls the actress closer to his body, points the rifle out at the men and starts to back away.

The fire didn't catch. The house didn't burn. He had to find his way back to his camp without a light, six kilometers in the dark, and as he swung the machete through vines he couldn't see, he had time to think, and to get angrier.

He thought about the American proprietor. He thought about the girl he'd been with at the cartel house, his Italian girlfriend, purring in his ear. After the stunt he'd just pulled, he knew the comandantes wouldn't give him the chance to leave camp again, not for days at least. But even then, as he swung his machete so hard he heard his shoulder joint snap, he was already making plans.

The actress tries not to breathe. The way the rebel has the knife pressed against her throat makes it hard to, makes her chin tilt up at an angle that hurts. At first she tries to keep her gaze down, so she can see what the others are doing to help her, but it makes the muscles in her eyes strain and ache. So she lets herself look at the sky, or what little sky there is out here: a scrap of white hatched over by tree branches.

Her brain spins. Her lungs burn, and she doesn't know what to do with her hands. She makes herself take little sips of air through her nose, and when the actress smells the man she realizes: I know him. He was at the cartel house that night, with Hank.

The American actor's mouth hangs open; his breath won't get in any other way. His heart feels like a stone hurled against a salt flat, over and over. The director is to the left and the machete is ten meters behind them both and the rebel is the fourth point of the diamond, the actress pulled tight to his chest. He tries to plot the arrangement of the trees but there are too many of them. There is no opening. There is nowhere he could run.

He is thinking of running anyway, when the director realizes who the rebel is. He is thinking of running when the director begins to speak.

The rebel can't understand a word the director is saying. The
rebel is crying and that was not the plan: he wants to swipe the tears off but he can't let the girl go. The plan was to take her, to ransom her for seven million pesetas, and bribe a pilot to take him to Cuba. Or the plan was to kill her like they'd killed Marina; no, to kill her like they'd killed an M-19 soldier, a ­sister-in-arms; to kill her because, when he saw her at the cartel house, he knew the American proprietor was fucking her; and that asshole should see how it felt. The plan kept changing, he'd had too much time to think.

For the last week, the comandantes had been keeping Juan Carlos under watch, made him shovel new chuntos, as punishment for leaving camp without permission. They must not have known he went to the American proprietor's house; if they had, it would have been worse for him. If they had, the comandante wouldn't have given him a stiff-jawed lecture about grief and self-control and the importance of the mission. He certainly wouldn't have left him alone to work.

Juan Carlos dug too deep, a grave's depth, farther, until brown water seeped up around his ankles and then his shins. He dug past sundown, through meals, manic, until the children from the camp crept up to the edge of his hole and stared. He'd planned and planned and waited until a moment he could break away, and he was sure, when he found the Italian girl, he would know what to do.

He still doesn't know what to do, not really, and so he presses the knife blade closer to the girl's throat, until he hears the sure sound of her choking on it.

The director speaks in his slowest Italian, in the shortest words he can summon, hoping that the rebel can puzzle it out:

Listen, listen. I know
you. I
know
you.

The rebel turns and stares down at a man on his knees.

The director holds his palms out as he speaks, to halt him. You are the one—they killed your girlfriend? You are the one that came to Hank's house? He pauses, searching his memory. The girl, Marina?

Here is something you don't see in a horror movie:

The fear at the center of a violent act. The hurt.

The rebel bites his lip like a child. He lets the lip go and leers, pivots to make sure no one else is watching.

The director's palms are still in the air, two white shapes, like targets. If you think we are with him—he pauses. If you think that because
I
was in Hank's house that night—

The American actor's breath is shaking in his chest. The mud on his face was smeared there by a makeup artist.

We're not his friends, the director says, his voice hitching. We're not a part of what he does. I swear it.

The actress sobs.

So you're going to do the right thing here, the director says, more slowly now. You're going to let us all go.

The rebel drops the knife to his side.

He stares straight at the director. There is something complicated in his face. The gun is still there, pressed to the back of the actress' hip.

There, the director says. Good.

But then the actress jerks forward like she's about to run, and the rebel throws the rifle diagonally across her body like a seat belt and pulls her back in. He presses the rifle hard to her sternum with one hand, uses the other to reach across her body and slash her once, deep, into the flesh just below her elbow crease.

The skin parts, pink. Then the blood streams.

The rebel puts the hand with the knife over her mouth, keeps the knife in his grip to stifle the sound she's making: a keening that is not quite as human as a scream.

The American actor's skin is on fire with that sound. It moves past the skin and fills up his head, his chest. It halves him.

Here is something none of them know:

How long they can bear to stand here, like this, before anyone moves.

We are not meant to stay in moments like these, all that hate hung in the air. It is why we watch horror movies. We want something to leap out and split the dread open, so fast it couldn't be real, its teeth longer than in life, our bodies releasing more blood than any body has. We need it. We need it. Life without it is intolerable.

The rebel closes his eyes. The actress has started to thrash. He is thinking shut up, stay still. Please, just let me think.

He doesn't realize just how long he's taken his eyes off the American actor.

He didn't realize: when the director tossed the machete, he didn't see where it landed.

When he opens his eyes, it's like a swift kick in the brain: the glare on the steel, right there in the mud. He sees the whites of the American actor's knuckles, the American actor's feet moving, his hand sweeping the machete up. Then he looks up and sees his face.

He has never seen a man more scared.

• • •

The American actor is not you.

You are not the one who swings the machete, hard, into the tendon behind the rebel's knee; the American actor does that. He hears it split with a pop, like a vine breaking, and then the rebel's hands go limp. The rebel drops everything at once, the
rifle, the knife, his grip on the girl. His whole body goes slack, and then he is on the ground.

You could never be the kind of person this American actor is.

Because if you were, why is it so easy to imagine the way the rebel must have felt? The hard punch of the earth as it finds his back. The canopy of leaves, swarming into his sight line like insects. You are all so deep in the jungle that there is almost no sky, just trees, air thick as soup, the howl of invisible birds. If you were the man who struck this man down, why can you feel it so clearly: the snap and the grunt and the wet suck of the mud under you, the rush of bloodless fear as the director appears above you, holding the gun.

The American actor doesn't drop the machete. The grip is covered in filthy medical tape and its texture feels strange in his hand. He watches the director aim the rifle, squinting through the sights like he's focusing a lens. The American actor feels the way we all do, when we are witness to things like this and do nothing: like he is two steps outside of his body, waiting for some signal to come back.

The rebel opens his mouth to speak. The director shoots twice: once into his cheekbone, once into the center of his throat.

• • •

The actress has her back to the men when the shots come. She holds her palm over the wound and turns to face the sound.

The actor's heart is made of salt. His tongue is made of salt. This isn't happening, he thinks. This couldn't be happening to him.

But then he hears the director, a high sharp sob and a sniff. His voice is quiet, strangled.

How can we bury him? he says. We can't bury him.

The actor stalls, trying to make his tongue work. Ugo—

The mud is too thick.

What are we—

We don't have a shovel. I—we don't.

Is the director crying? The rifle is still in his hands.

Tears are sticky and half dried on the actress' face. She's stepped closer, within two paces of the body, and stuck herself there, staring and clutching her arm.

Who is he? The actor tries.

The director hardens. I shouldn't tell you that.

The actor looks at the actress. She flinches but says nothing.

His mouth is full of salt, but he tries to talk. Maybe he's—

He's no one. The director is furious. His skin is full of a sudden flush of blood, his voice fully his own again. He's no one, okay? It's better for you, if—

He falters.

I am the director, he says, uncertain. I will take care of this. I—

The actress sobs once. The director looks at her, his face full of a look like jealousy.

• • •

Later, the actor will lie in his hotel room and ask himself questions. Years later, in another room, he will admit to himself what he has done, and that it
was
him who did it. He will try to understand what he did next.